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December 19, 2005
I mentioned in this post that I was interested in a biopolitics concerned with the process whereby animals become human beings through a shaping or production of the human against a background of life defined as worthless and eliminable.
In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot addresses the inhuman unreason, madness and the great confinement of the insane. Referring to Foucault he says:
"...what is being constiuted in silence...is the very world of Unreason: a world of which madness is but a part and to which classicism annexes sexual prohibitions, religious interdicts, and all excesses of thought and of the heart." (p.198)
Blanchot goes on to say:
Such a moral experimentation with unreason, which is the other side of classicism, is tacitly carried out and becomes manifest in giving rise to this almost invisible arrangement: the closed space where dwell side by side the insane, the debauched, the heretical, and the disorderly---a sort of mumuring emptiness at the heaart of the world, a vague meance from which reason defends itself with the high walls that symbolize the refusal of all dialogue: ex-communication. There is no relation with the negative. (p.198)
We have a partition between the human and inhuman throughout classcism and the scientific Enlightenment that reduces madness to silence.
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